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Star Wars: The Old Republic 'not a top 5 game' for Electronic Arts

Star Wars the Old Republic has lost more than 400,000 subscribers, and while EA maintains the game's 1.3 million subscriber base is within it expectations, the company said it is not considered in it's top five franchises.

Star Wars: The Old Republic has seen a dramatic loss in subscribers, moving from 1.7 million users in February to 1.3 million users at the end of March. In a conference call, Electronic Arts said the loss of 400K users was due to the drop-off of casual and trial users after the game's first billing cycle.

While the situation may seem dire for the ambitious online game, EA emphasized that the 1.3 million base users fell within the expectation the company had when it purchased BioWare back in 2007. The company also reiterated that TOR is still "profitable" and the number two MMO on the market.

When questioned about the game's performance, EA CEO John Riccitiello responded that The Old Republic was not as important as its "top five" flagship franchises, such as Battlefield, FIFA and Mass Effect. However, he added that TOR is definitely in the "top ten" and is "more important" than Tiger Woods PGA, for example.

When asked what EA planned to do to try to increase the user base, EA responded that BioWare planned some aggressive content updates by through the end of the year, including PVP content, more achievements, giving guilds some added attention, and adding feature sets fans have been clamoring for. Undoubtedly, additional free weekends will probably be in the works.

John Keefer

Contributing Editor

John Keefer is a curmudgeon that has been in journalism for 35 years, the last 16 in the video games industry. He loves real-time strategy games and prefers old-school Total Annihilation to StarCraft. He also loves isometric RPGs, and has been addicted to World of Warcraft for more than 10 years. He sucks at shooters and multiplayer and is purely a PC guy. And being a former member of Shack, he also likes Chatty. Go figure.